I WAS AMONG several who saw him die. His name was Surjit
Singh Penta, and the year was 1988. A smartly calibrated siege
of the Golden Temple had just ended in the surrender of all
the militants holed up inside the Harmandir Sahib, the Temple’s
sanctum sanctorum. As they filed out and squatted in the
courtyard of the serai on the Temple’s periphery, a sudden commotion
broke out. The police spotters had recognised a major militant.
But before they could lay hands on him, he
had swallowed his cyanide pill, and though
the police threw him into a jeep to rush him
to hospital, he was dead. Penta’s story deserves
telling because it illustrates the
pathology of oppression. The young Sikh
was a national-level athlete representing
Delhi before he became a witness to the brutal
Sikh massacres of 1984. By the time he
committed suicide a few years later more
than 40 killings were attributed to him.

Illustration
Anand Naorem

Before he became a
terrorist Penta had been terrorised by the state — or its malign absence.
That is often the sequence: the state’s excesses, followed by those of
the individual. The line between law enforcement and high-handedness is
always very thin. In India, dangerously, it is being smudged every day.
Are Naxalites victims before they become perpetrators? Are young militants
in the north-east and Kashmir brutalised before they become brutal? Is
the ordinary citizen meted out insensitivity before he becomes desensitised?
What does one say about a country where one turns to the police with trepidation,
where no one expects the men in khaki to do the right thing?

While extreme viewpoints have
a right to exist in a free society, it
goes without saying that no one ought to have any sympathy for
the positions of bigoted groups and individuals. The kind who base
their existence on perilous ideas of divine rights, exclusion of unbelievers,
intolerance, violence, and a preferred way of life to which
everyone else must conform. If SIMI is one such organisation, it
deserves our criticism and scorn. If it is breaking the law and
fomenting hatred, it deserves to be rigorously investigated and
brought to justice. But what if it is a target of widespread and growing
prejudice? What if the drive against it is misdirected and
designed to seed more terror than it aims to suppress? And while
steel may cut steel, as the old Hindi saw goes, can prejudice ever neutralise
prejudice?

For the seven years since SIMI has been outlawed, state agencies have
been insisting that the outfit is an anti-national organisation engaged in
conspiracies to destabilise the government through acts of terror; and
that it brazenly preaches sedition, being closely linked with Pakistanbased
terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Tyaba, Hizb-ul-
Mujahideen, and the Jaish-e-Mohammed.
Alleged SIMI activists stand accused of some
of the worst terrorist crimes on Indian soil,
including bomb blasts that killed 187 people
in Mumbai’s local trains two years ago.

BUT A three-month long investigation
by TEHELKA — carried out all over the
country — reveals that a large majority
of these cases are redolent of a chilling and
systematic witch-hunt against innocent Muslims.
Sadly, the expose shows it is not just the
policing and intelligence agencies that are to
blame — even the judicial process is often
complicit in the terrible miscarriage of justice.
Ajit Sahi’s painstaking and remarkable
reportage reveals a shocking web of dubious
cases being pursued against so-called operatives
of SIMI — cases which lack evidence,
cases which flagrantly ignore standard
procedures of criminal investigation and trial,
cases that callously destroy the lives of young
men and their families.

The Indian state must tread
carefully. The individual tragedies
point to a wider psychosis. For the
last many years — abetted by
global trends — the state’s actions
and utterances seem to be deepening
a prejudice against Muslims.
Catching the mood, Bollywood’s arch villains are now mostly Islamic.
India has 160 million Muslims - more than Pakistan, more than any
other country save Indonesia. Even if 10,000 are radicalised it’s barely
a tree in a forest. To create an atmosphere that blights the entire forest
is a mistake. To foster a psychology of siege in an entire community
is a disaster. Before it seeks further bans, the state ought to
vigorously introspect. William Faulkner wrote that “prejudice is
shown to be the most destructive when it is internalised”. TEHELKA’s
detailed investigation suggests, alarmingly, that in the shiningstruggling
India of today there is a real danger of that.•

The Case Of The Absconding LawyerMidway through the tribunal, a key SIMI lawyer is suddenly arrested in an old, forgotten case and released as arguments end, Reports AJIT SAHI

•

A Judge Stirs A Hornet's NestMere opinions, a stunning abscence of facts and gross violations of law in the Centre’s case against SIMI are what moved tribunal judge Geeta Mittal to reject the ban, Reports AJIT SAHI